yesbutisitart?

For a long time, I've used a camera to record moments in time, using a variety of film and digital cameras and putting into practice all the usual so-called essential photography skills such as composition, exposure, focus, depth-of-field, etc. But some years ago I came to the conclusion that it's not enough to simply record a moment, that I wanted to move away from straightforward capture to a more abstract and artistic documentation of those moments. I started using slow shutter speeds and camera movement to blur and abstract those captured instants in time and I was pleased with the results these techniques produced. And then some time later I felt I needed another change. I was standing on a platform on the London Underground, waiting for a train home. People were rushing by, trying to get quickly away from or quickly to somewhere (or alternatively seeming to delay getting to or away from somewhere). I wondered how I could take this commonplace scene and transform it into something less mundane, something artistic. Importantly I wanted to experiment with how quickly this could be done and not spend time re-working an image, tweaking again and again the composition, or exposure, or saturation, etc. All of the images here are made using an iPhone and various apps. The images you see here are the final works of art: the original images are gone so there is no temptation to go back on various decisions I have made. I can't go back and re-think, re-start, re-do. Each of these images is still of course a very short timeframe, a fraction of a second, as every photograph or image is. And although the everyday scene is still identifiable, these mundane fractions of a second have been transformed into something more significant, so that a sense of permanence is created out of that fleeting moment and is not lost but captured in an image that is worthwhile coming back to.